The Prehistory of the Mind.

By Steven Mithen.

Thames & Hudson. 1996. £16.95 hardback. ISBN: 0-500-05081-3.

Review by Martin P. Evison.

Steven Mithen's The Prehistory of the Mind is an ambitious attempt to build
a model of the evolutionary history of the mind from archaeological
evidence. Whilst the book has much to commend it as an accessible and
comprehensive introduction, both to the relevant palaeoanthropological
models and to contemporary theories of the mind derived by psychologists
and cognitive scientists, its claims to have sought and found 'the
cognitive foundations of art, religion and science' are exaggerated.

The book is well structured, with our evolutionary history from the time of
our common primate ancestors introduced as a series of acts in a drama.
Readers are then diverted to an overview of some contemporary theories of
cognition and Mithen's own postulation and are then returned to a series of
chapters taking them through evolutionary history, using primatology and
the fossil and material culture record as evidence, weaving in a cognitive
thread. Final chapters tie up the arguments and dispense with a possible
cognitive 'loose end' -- the origins of agriculture.

Mithen develops his central thesis from Leda Cosmides & John Tooby's model
of the mind likening it to a Swiss army knife (discussed in Barkow et al 'The Adapted Mind', (1992)), consisting of a collection of
independent task-orientated modules, but goes further in insisting both on
a degree of 'generalised intelligence', which he sees as understated in
Cosmides & Tooby's argument and on some leakage -- in Mithen's terms
'cognitive fluidity' -- occurring between these domains. The mind's
evolutionary history, he suggests, is a three-stage process: a generalised
intelligence in primates and early hominids, a modular intelligence
evolving to its ultimate in archaic Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and a
'cognitively fluid' mentality arising not with anatomically modern humans,
but with the 'big bang' of human culture at 60,000 to 30,000 years ago.

Mithen builds on Fodor's The Modularity of Mind (1983), Gardner's Frames
of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983), and Barkow, Cosmides
& Tooby's The Adapted Mind (1992) to support the modular component of his
model. Dan Sperber's (1994) concept of 'metarepresentation', as well as
Margaret Boden's (1990) and Arthur Koestler's (1975) ideas of
'transformation' or 'interlocking' of conceptual spaces are used to support
the idea of communication between these task-orientated domains. He uses
the notion of 'ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny' to support his evolutionary
arguments with models from child development, such as Annette
Karmiloff-Smith's Beyond Modularity (1992), in which a component of
generalised intelligence is also claimed for young children. Mithen
marshals support for his developing argument well, but so well that one is
left struggling to recognise a novel hypothesis. The cognitive models are
pre-existing, and the idea that creativity is due to analogy and metaphor,
themselves permitted by communication across cognitive domains, is evident
in Boden and Koestler's work. Crucially, Mithen's central use of the idea
that 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' to map cognitive development from
life history to evolutionary history, as proposed earlier by Thomas Wynn
(cited Mithen p. 62), is problematic. This is a complex enough issue in
biology and an analogy which Mithen wishes to apply only hesitantly to the
analysis of cognitive evolution. Mithen states: "I have no theoretical
conviction that recapitulation of the evolution of the mind during
development necessarily occurs" (p.63). The spine of the book is not well
bound!

I am not convinced that anatomically modern Homo sapiens of circa 100,000
years ago lacked the cognitive capacity of their Upper Palaeolithic
descendants. Would it not take time for knowledge to accumulate? Mithen
dismisses suggestions of earlier artistic capabilities such as, for example,
those claimed for Homo heidelbergensis of Bilzingsleben at circa 300,000
years ago (p. 151) -- markings on bone which he anyway attributes to
Neanderthals (p. 161). Mithen may be on further shaky ground given Richard
Fullagar and Paul Taçon's early dates for red ochre and rock art at sites in
northern Australia (Fullagar et al. 1996; Taçon et al. 1997 in press). How
fluid does your cognition have to be to navigate Torres Strait?

Early on, Mithen rejects cognitive analogies with computers, which he
dismisses as simple problem solving devices. The mind thinks, it creates,
it imagines. This cannot happen within a computer. Computers just do what
programmers tell them to do... (p. 35). I find terms like 'think', 'create'
and 'imagine' rather vague, but I am reminded of algorithms which evolve
novel anatomical forms and the fascinating fractal shapes generated from
Mandelbrot sets. Computer scientists will recognise many of the cognitive
terms recounted by Mithen as having analogies in computer hardware and
software structure: 'input', 'module', 'domain' -- and the idea that certain
propensities are hard wired.

The computational analogies cannot be dismissed as readily as Mithen would
wish and, anyway, we could do far better by heeding neuroscientist Susan
Greenfield's cautions, frequently heard on Radio 4's Midweek, that there is
a chemical dimension to the brain, in addition to neuro-physical structure,
which has no analogy in the microelectronics of a computer. The mind is
capable of emotions as well as thought, and both are reflected in the
biology and chemistry of the brain. Discussions of emotions and the brain
are decidedly scanty in this volume. Given that Mithen only aims to consider
the mind and cognition, the latter omission is perhaps understandable, but
not so the former. However, I cannot accept that one can so easily relegate
the brain in a cognitive model, especially one that relies on fossil cranial
material as evidence. Exactly how does Mithen suppose that dedicated areas
of the mind become suddenly connected late on in human evolution? Unless
there was already some connection, in which case they were never isolated,
an entirely new class of neurological structures and their underlying
genetic basis must have appeared abruptly. I find such an idea anatomically
and genetically implausible. Mithen's approach perpetuates mind-body dualism
and ill-defined concepts such as 'think', 'create' and 'imagine' mean yet
more special pleading for humans.

Of course, it is unfair to expect Mithen to cover neurobiology, genetics and
computer science, as well as archaeology, linguistics, psychology, social
anthropology and cognitive science! It is pleasing enough to see another
sign that the idealisation/demonisation of science in archaeology may be
over.

The Prehistory of the Mind is a well written review and part synthesis of
pre-existing work, which the author does much to acknowledge. If nothing
more had been claimed I would have no qualms, but Mithen insists that he has
used archaeology to further understanding of how the mind works and I do not
find this a sustainable argument. It remains early days for cognitive
archaeology; we know some 'whats' and 'whens', but few 'whys'. With The
Prehistory of the Mind Mithen has put archaeology firmly on the cognitive
agenda, but we have a long way to go before we will know 'what was going on
in their minds'.

Sperber, D. 1994. The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations. In Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. L.A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press pp. 39-67.

Martin Evison's first degree was in genetics. He was an amateur archaeologist
for many years before completing M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in archaeology
at Sheffield University. He is now a research associate in the
Department of Forensic Pathology, with research interests in computer
simulation, human biological and cultural diversity, and forensic
archaeology.